MSH Blog Tour: Week 2 - Inspiration

This week, I was supposed to host Stacey Bee on my site as part of the blog tour. I didn't get her post, so I will put up my own post for this week's topic.

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This week’s question on the Mountain Springs House blog tour is: “What inspired you to write this book?” I’ll answer this in the best way I can.

My first (and, to date, only) novel is Adventure Hunters. It is a fantasy novel that I began more than seven years ago. I was always more of a science fiction fan than a fantasy fan, but my friend Jimmy got me interested in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. The movies first, books later. After watching them I had decided to try my hand at fantasy. At that time I wasn’t writing novels but screenplays, with an eye to entering them in screenwriting contests. I didn’t want to write anything like LOTR, so I spent some time trying to go the opposite route, more low fantasy and technology, than high fantasy.

I started AH, would work on it for several months, stop for months at a time, pick it up again, and repeat the cycle. As I worked on it my life went on, I moved to Japan, and eventually gave up on being a film director, but I still liked writing. I finished AH and wrote several other screenplays. After writing so many screenplays, I wrote some short stories, using prose as a nice break from the script format.

In 2011 I read an online article about self-publishing. I thought it was something I could do. I decided to turn my most complete script, which happened to be Adventure Hunters, into a novel. I reworked it, got a cover designed, and self-published it in 2012. A year later, I decided to submit to a publisher, who eventually accepted it.

That single article on CNet is what has inspired me to write AH as a novel and move into the publishing world. If not for the independent/self-publishing revolution going on now, Adventure Hunters may have never seen the light of day.

The characters and places in Adventure Hunters were inspired by trying to avoid what was in Harry Potter and LOTR. My characters are fairly simple folks just trying to get by in the world. Building their world was one of the most difficult things to do, but expanding on it is something I’m looking forward to doing in future installments.